Saturday, 28 March 2009

Politics is not a profession - part 7

Regular readers will know the irritation I feel whenever it is suggested that politics should be a career or a profession. Though I wouldn't agree with Carl Mortished's solution to this, he's right to recognise the asinine delusion that politics can be a 'career';

MPs imagine they do a job of work; they see their position in the House of Commons as part of a “career” when it should be a vocation. A “career” in politics is a corruption of the electoral mandate. Careers are about personal advancement when the purpose of an MP is to represent his constituency and the nation at large. An MP is not employed. Therefore he should not have a wage. His expenses are not an issue. The office, the secretary or the PA can be provided by the Civil Service. The question is how, without employment, MPs should live. In an ideal world, they would live frugally, as Plato said the guardians should in his Utopian Republic. In the real world, an MP's temporary mandate might be seen as National Service.

I think it was Philip K Dick that imagined a world where the political leader had a bomb permanently strapped to him which was wirelessly connected to the electorates voting buttons: if people were dissatisfied, by a majority, the politico exploded. I suspect that our Prime Mentalist would not last more than a few seconds.

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